iPhone still the top-seller in Q4 2017 says Strategy Analytics

So, Apple sold fewer iPhones in Q4 2017 than the year before and that's while having both the iPhone 8 and iPhone X in steady supply. The dip in sales is alarming to some because it is the first time in the iPhone's history that it's decreased year over year. There's various reasons that analysts are trying to determine as the cause. Higher price of the iPhone X, confusion or indecision in choosing between iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X, uncertainty about the lack of of Touch ID on the X, the list goes on.

Despite this, Apple still had record earnings and now Strategy Analytics is telling us the entire smartphone industry has taken a 9 per cent decline in 2017. This is mostly attributed to a 16 percent decline in demand from China, the biggest smartphone market in the world.

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PvP arcade game, Mini Golf King gets a new update with some fancy new features

Golf may be the noble sport, but it certainly isn't to everyone's taste. For some it's a tricky game that's just too slow and too difficult to master. Fortunately for developer Bluehole PNIX, those things can't be said of its latest arcade multiplayer, Mini Golf King, which has just received a brand new update.

Released onto the app stores late last year, Mini Golf King embellishes its own brand of excitement to the game, with a laid back casual style that can be enjoyed across over 30 levels. Each level offers something a little different, with winding courses littered with gems to collect as well as plenty of tricky obstacles like pendulums, drawbridges, tube slides and mazes along the way.

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‘Mario Kart’ is coming to smartphones

The latest Nintendo IP to make its way to mobile devices is a popular one. The Japanese company just announced that it’s bringing Mario Kart to both Android and iOS. The game is going to be called Mario Kart Tour and it’ll be released within the next financial year, which puts that between April 2018 and March 2019. Nintendo is keeping mum about what we can expect from the game but we’re confident the title will be a popular one as this particular franchise is one of Nintendo’s biggest.

As Fortune points out, the company was careful in wording the release to be a mobile-only release instead of saying which platform it’ll be available on. Nintendo has previously been releasing its mobile games on iOS before Android but the wording suggests both platforms might get it simultaneously. What do you think? Is this something you’d want to play?

Source: The Verge

Google took down over 700,000 malicious Android apps in 2017

There are over 3,500,000 “approved” applications in the Google Play Store but not all of these are useful or fun, a bunch of them are designed to wreak havoc on users lives and that’s where Google has been hard at work to take these bad apps out. The company recently announced it has taken down over 700,000 apps from the Play Store, which is a 70 percent increase from the total removals they’ve done in 2016. “Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and action against them earlier,” Google Play product manager Andrew Ahn wrote in a blog post. “99 percent of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them.”

Google claims they’re able to do this with the company’s “new machine learning models and techniques.” It made it easier for them to detect the bad apps as well as any of the copycat apps that try to deceive users. Google says they’ve taken down a quarter of a million of these impersonating apps in 2017. They’ve also kept “tens of thousands” of apps with inappropriate content (those that have pornography, hate, illegal activities, and extreme violence) out of the app store. Machine learning has helped the human reviewers make sure these apps and developers were kept away from the Play Store. They’re also working on keeping Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs) out of the Store, even though these are as Ahn says “small in volume.” Of course, they aren’t 100% successful and have had a few bad apps slip into its system but Google promises they’re working to improve their methods and machine learning models so that they keep these apps out.

Source: The Verge + Inquirer.net